Labour’s campaign review

Someone in Labour leaked a copy of their campaign review to 3 News. It is online here.

Some of their conclusions are stark:

In general, Labour’s campaign preparation was inadequate.

Perceptions of tension around the leadership and disunity within caucus seriously undermined Labour’s credibility with voters and frustrated any attempt to present a Party that was ready for government.

Labour did not present a coherent and convincing image of itself or its policies. There was a general lack of message discipline, and the policies put forward at the election were often complex, difficult to understand and easily misrepresented by our opponents.

By misrepresented, they mean correctly explained!

Some of the recommendations:

It is imperative that Labour acts – and is seen to act as a disciplined and coherent team that is ready for government if it is to win the trust of voters in 2017. As a key element of this process, the senior leadership team within Caucus should be given greater prominence and responsibility throughout the three years.

Great care should be taken in deciding when and which policies should be put before the public, and the language that should be used to explain them.

The first one is the leader should stop hogging all the limelight. The second seems to suggest that some of their policies will be kept secret form the public!

Labour has still to define positively and confidently convincing, alternative macro-economic policies, which also respond to wider social and environmental issues,despite emerging international challenges to neo-liberal orthodoxy

This sounds like a Bryan Gould point – railing against neoliberalism, despite the fact we do not have anything close to a neoliberal Government.

All electorate candidates should also nominate for the list to ensure that candidates campaign for both the electorate and the Party. It was apparent in the last election that some electorate candidates did not campaign for the Party vote.

At the end of the day this review is a mess. However the biggest problem will be if the party focusses on the guff in it (I can already imagine the fights that changes to LEC and regional council rules will cause) and continues to ignore the very real political problems it faces – which remain largely unaddressed.

Given this review is a waste of the envelope it was written on, it will be interesting to see how the new leader and president react

Comments (44)

Paulus Gnome

Why does this report resonate so well with the best known ‘longest suicide note in history’ that was the British Labour party manifesto in 1983; seems the muppets do not learn from others or their history

kowtow

The simple fact is that traditionally conservative parties have moved so far to the left that labour parties have become irrelevant. Similarly the Greens on the extreme left are stealing voters from the left wing of labour parties, so they’re being attacked from both sides.

Not necessarily a good thing as conservative politicians have abandoned conservatism. Meanwhile working people keep paying for left wing ( progressive) policies espoused by all and sundry.

If any proof is needed as to how dysfunctional Labour is, and how far the once-great party of the workers has sunk, it is found in the last few sentences of DPF’s post.

Not only is someone in Labour’s inner circle deeply disloyal to the party and its leader, but it has given National fresh ammunition at a time when Labour was finally managing to land a hit on the PM courtesy of Murray McCully. By leaking the review yesterday to numerous media organisations, the focus now is back on Labour’s internal issues, dysfunction and disunity.

And now we can all, as we eat the popcorn referred to by JS above, play the time-honoured game of Guess Who The Leaker Is; my money is on Labour’s General Secretary.

So Labour think it’s all a big misunderstanding, ‘unpopular’ or ‘misunderstood’ policies shouldn’t be shown to the public in advance of an election, and they didn’t give the voters enough of a dog and pony show…I almost feel sorry for them. They may never get back into government with this sort of nonsense.

Biscuit

Are the Labour Party capable of doing anything properly?

Their review into why they lost last year (essentially because of a far more credible opponent. Direct credit my $10k fee to my ASB account, people!) has highlighted nothing that they couldn’t have come up with if each of their remaining Members of Parliament had been told to write an essay on the topic.

That it – the review – was leaked was just priceless. Mind, with the former leader behind the former leader behind the current leader has demonstrated he can’t be trusted with an embargoed document, just why folk thought the likes of him wouldn’t leak something that wasn’t embargoed is beyond me.

What are Labour focussed on at present?

A door
Staying united

None of those two issues are of any interest to the average New Zealander.

Think of all the taxpayer funds Chris Hipkins and his minions must have used to dream up that ingenuous reply to claims that it was LABOUR who wanted the door in question.
Think of the number of times that Richie McCaw has ever said ‘This is a united team!’ … rather than getting on with the job that that team’s fans expect him to do: crush the opposition.

@ Tarquin North – Bryan Gould was Vice-Chancellor at Waikato University until he retired in 2004, which would have brought him into contact with liberal academics such as Margaret Wilson.

And that too in indicative of another of the Labour Party’s issues; the party born on the West Coast out of the mining industry has been captured by academics with little or no real-world experience, to whom Chris Trotter’s mythical Waitakere Man cannot relate.

Boris Piscina

Ross12

If the rest of the report is written in a similar way then it is obviously a very wordy document that says nothing of substance. The paragraph DPF attributes to Gould is a classic example.
How do they expect voters to understand their thinking if they cannot articulate it well for themselves.

The review completely misses the importance of broad-based and engaged membership in big numbers.

It talks about how much more money National spent than Labour but fails to join the dots between National having 10s of thousands of members who provide the strong financial base on which other fundraising is built. They also play a big role in policy development and provide the people-power which helps win both electorates and party votes.

Adolf Fiinkensein

David Garrett

DPF: You quite rightly point out the suggestion that only SOME policies will be put to the voters in 2017…You can bet your arse that repealing three strikes won’t be one the public ever hears about…unless someone in the media specifically puts Little on the spot, and that is unlikely to happen.

The policy is still very vulnerable: we only have 76 second strikers and no third strikers. If the NACT government gets a fourth term, we will almost certainly have a dozen or so third strikers by 2020, all of whom will be such obviously evil bastards that Labour would have much more trouble repealing the law…but we aren’t in that position yet.

As DPF posted yesterday, the current position is that Labour is committed to repealing 3S…despite it working exactly as intended, and being massively popular. But watch them go very quiet on it next election.

The country has just passed a bit of a turning point; Maori treaty claims are all but resolved, and gay marriage has been introduced. Prostitution is now an enterprise that consenting adults can make a living from and pay tax on, rape and violence remain crimes as they should. There are laws protecting the property interests of people in defacto relationships.

We have dealt with most of the old taboos that were keeping some people down for no good reason other than that they were old taboos that made some people uncomfortable. I can’t think of any major civil rights issues that are now outstanding in NZ and require fixing. The battle is over. Liberal humanists have won.

IMHO there is now a unique opportunity for the Labour party to wash its hands of the liberal social policy that Helen Clark hung her hat on. There are established far left pressure parties (Greens, Mana) that can continue to advocate for any of that stuff… and because their base is extreme left activists (or educated wannabe activists) they can push harder on those matters than Labour can.

Labour should move right, back to something more like an old Labour position. A real people position. Not a far-left radical activist social theory position.

Less income tax for hard working blokes.
Less of the vehicle grants, special grants, etc etc for benes.
More of a focus on employment issues.
Less of the Maori stuff.
Less of the gay stuff.
Less crim cuddling.
Forget about grand socialist schemes to nationalise electricity or build a million state houses / kiwi houses.

Just generally less of the liberal academic social theory, and a bit more advocating for dollars in the pockets of blue collar boiler plate types who want to get ahead.

THEN they would have a chance of bringing back some of the old-labour voters who they’ve lost to National, because Labour just doesn’t have anything for them any more (just extreme left child activism and gay rights gay rights gay rights) while Key seems like a real bloke who does the business, and not the far-right psychopath the Labour Party keeps insisting he is.

(It is exactly the same in Australia, I have seen crusty old-Labor people backing Tony Abbott because he seems like a real bloke who talks sense.)

Old.Mickey.Blue.Eyes

No surprise it was leaked, and no surprise it was as pathetic as it appears. Look at the losers who Labour commissioned to do the review….no one with a track record of winning even a meat raffle at the RSA. The blinkers to reality remain well and truely on !

Biscuit

I like that one of the things Little told us in the report was that the electorate was confused (what a silly electorate we are, eh?) about how Labour would treat its coalition partners … and that he would remedy that (or clarify the position) before the 2017 election.

Anyone else wondering just how the hell he is gonna do that?

Saying ‘The Greens are important. We will allow them up to 5 Cabinet seats’ is really gonna resonate with the (large) majority who don’t want to see the Greens anywhere CLOSE to the Beehive.

And how the hell is he gonna persuade Winston to agree, before an election, that he will side with the Left? Winston lives by his ‘Balance of Responsibility’ mantra and committing to one side or the other has never fitted that!

Tarquin North

K.S, he always struck me as a poster boy for the Fabians and for some strange reason he reminds me of Helen Clarks doormat Peter. Let’s face it, you or I could have come up with that review and probably saved them a heap of money. It’s not what the review says it’s what it doesn’t say. At least he had the balls to fire a couple of blanks at the unions which to him would be the equivalent of a flame thrower in the real world.

David Garrett

RRM: Good analysis…and advice that if followed by Labour would be a real threat to the Nats winning a fourth term.

One quibble though: do you seriously believe Maori claims are all but over? Not a snowball’s chance in hell…the next generation of claimants – who will claim that the last lot had no mandate and settled too cheaply – are at high school and uni right now. In ten years time, all of the post 90’s settlements will be said to be as “invalid” as those of the 1940’s.

Harriet

Brigitte

They’ve missed an important part of the solution (the Greens should also note this).

After the debacle of the CGT, all potential candidates are now required to discuss in depth their preferred policy options with people that might be opposed. This could be achieved by an active participation on a non-left blog such as KB (points will be deducted from potential candidates for blogging on TS or TDB). More capable candidates should show their superior ability by discussing on such blogs as WO. A warning on the latter, don’t waste your time on Green friendly policies as you will be banned which will demonstrate a lack of commonsense and you will, therefore, be disqualified.

OneTrack

gump – “Arguably the capital gains tax issue was misrepresented by their opponents”

That would be a poor argument. What was your understanding of Labour’s CGT at the time. Because most people had no idea, including Cunliffe. Virtually every question he was asked on it, was answered with “Oh, that will be for the expert committee to work out”. So Labour’s “policy”(tm) was something along the lines of, we want another tax, trust us – we know what we are doing.

But, of course, it was just that the unwashed heathens were too dumb to understand their enlightened policy. Yeah. Right.

Satantango

@kowtow

Not necessarily a good thing as conservative politicians have abandoned conservatism. Meanwhile working people keep paying for left wing ( progressive) policies espoused by all and sundry.

Conservatism is not the same thing as right wing. True conservatism, especially of the British variety, values existing institutions and the status quo but at the same time recognises that change is inevitable and is best managed in a gradual, considered manner in order to preserve the best of traditional virtues. In a sense conservatism is non-ideological – it has no particular policy platforms as it distrusts all ideologies – left or right wing.

So National pragmatism is the natural response of a conservative party to inevitable social and economic changes, and not that of a right-wing party. It is not primarily a right-wing party, but a conservative one. And thank heavens for that! If you want a right-wing party, try ACT.

greenjacket

So after an eight month review, Labour still believe that their product is right and that the problem is the customers, and that better marketing will solve the problem.
To Labour supporters: It is not “message discipline” (whatever that means) – it is that the product you are trying to sell only appeals to a small and shrinking demographic. If you want to break out of that, you need to develop a new product.

Huevon

What is Labour’s future? It has to be one of those eternal questions, like why is there evil and suffering in the world, and why can’t England win a World Cup…

The problems with building a platform based on “challenging neo-liberal orthodoxy” is that one has to be indoctrinated into what “neoliberalism” is in the first place, and then work out why it is a problem. These are simply too many hoops for the majority of voters to jump through.

My bet on a few “gamechangers” Labour could do to shake things up (based on what seems to be going on overseas)….
…regional devolution – we’ve had supercity amalgamations, take the next step and devolve taxing and welfare powers. Let communities look after their own and take power away from the big business/big government globalists
…attacking the evil of internet pornography – it’s robbing a whole generation of young men of their balls
…becoming pro-life: that is the civil rights issue of the 21st century, just take a look at the overseas opinion polls about the views of young people on the issue

tvb

The Labour Party just loves talking about its-self. The question they have to answer is the basic structure of society has changed significantly since when the Labour Party was first formed. We are a middle class society now with middle class expectations. We do have a poor underclass mainly on welfare so what is the Labour Party’s answer to that. Secondly with the decline in the Labour core vote their core coalition has fractured into several parties particularly the rise of the Greens. The Labour Party does not know how to deal with the Greens. Whereas on the one hand they need the Greens to form a Government but on the other hand the Greens are competing for their vote. Especially Ms Turei trying (without much success) to get the Greens to get votes from people who care about poverty. The review does not discuss any of these issues and is consequently rather useless in that it proposes some minor fiddling of an organisational nature. Carry on I say. Perhaps they should have got Roger Douglas to take a hard look at the Labour Party. He concluded 30 years ago the party had lost its meaning.

AgentBallSack

backster

Perhaps I mis-understood, but I took from Duncan Garners comments yesterday that the document leaked was a sanitised version deliberately leaked to divert attention from the far more trenchant and plain spoken official report, hence the gobbledegook like so.
“Labour has still to define positively and confidently convincing, alternative macro-economic policies, which also respond to wider social and environmental issues,despite emerging international challenges to neo-liberal orthodoxy”

RossM

Manolo. Gould was bitterly opposed to the Blairites – who were too right wing for his tastes.

The Green party raised and spent more money for the 2014 election than Labour did. It was stupid to compare Labour’s money against National’s. The Labour party is mainly being run by the unions, who are a bit stingy. When Labour re-connects with the people they might start attracting donations from the people, and developing policies that people want to vote for. But that would also mean candidates from the people, and a lot of time-serving unionists in Parliament might lose their cosy jobs, including the lowest ranked list Labour MP that managed to just scrape into Parliament.

As soon as it was announced that Gould would be heading the review one thing was clear; Labour had zero intentions of actually having a real review.

And the result confirms that. It’s a whitewash. Gould has nothing of substance to say about Labour’s failed policy proposals, or the fact that since Key took power every Labour leader has looked decidedly ill-prepared on economic issues. Gould cannot pry himself away from his simplistic ‘neo-liberal vs socialism’ binary thinking and so does not understand (as almost nobody in Labour has) what Labour is up against. And the very serious internal divisions and problems in Labour, including Union dominance which helped to lose them the last election, and the silly proposals bubbling up from the grassroots about free gender re-assignment surgery, are ignored or swept under the carpet with appeals to a false public unity.

And Gould’s advice amounts to throwing a coat of paint over the car wreck and being dishonest to the public about their policy intentions.

tvb

The last budget was a political master stroke. The Governmenthss brought in a capital gains tax just when Labour has appeared to abandon it. And they have now uprated benefits. That is something the Labour Party did not dare do. National swings right sometimes and then they swings left meanwhile having to vice like grip on middle NZ. Some of the business deals the Government does barely passes the smell test. The latest one with the Saudi businessman is one such deal. It also involves that notorious Michelle Boag who is trouble on everything she touches. I bet John Banks Regrets her involvement in his campaign. I have a deep foreboding there is more trouble to come because of her involvement.

Manolo

You have to laugh at these two imbeciles from The sub-Standard, who write about the source of the leak:

“Colonial Rawshark 4 June 2015 at 1:59 pm
The GCSB has copies of the full review report from the earliest drafts.

Skinny 4 June 2015 at 4:19 pm
Yes yes very good point… out of ‘national security interest’ of course. A few strokes of the keys and delivered into Paddy’s inbox with a (Labour MP) @parliament.org.nz addy…. Silly young Gower would be none the wiser.”

Richard

So basically this ”report” tells Labour:

They have very little money
They have very little leadership
They have very little focused party organisation or discipline
They have very little ability to communicate to the public
They have very little idea what their values actually are anymore
They have very little actual clear policy or commitment to anything

Well at least they’ve got Andrew Little, although considering his continuing rate of failure in the polls and parliament they may want very little of Mr Little in future.

Richard

laworder

Re David Garrett’s earlier comments on Labours Three Strikes Policy;
A poll is running is this very issue. Will this policy make you more or less likely to support Labour?
Poll herehttps://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NQ6NTVY